


A Natural History of the Senses

by ninemoons42



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Reading Aloud, Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-16
Updated: 2011-02-16
Packaged: 2017-10-16 22:35:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/170122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur takes a job away from Eames. Eames manages to find a way to close the distance. Smexytimes ensue.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Natural History of the Senses

  
title: A Natural History of the Senses  
author: [](http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**ninemoons42**](http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/)  
pairing: Arthur/Eames  
warnings: voice porn, actual sexytimes with top!Arthur, and language. Prompts include: dirty talk, porn with [some] plot, [some] domesticity.  
The screen names are once again taken from [Five Messages Arthur Never Sent Eames [and the one he did]](http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/67196.html), but you don't have to read that story to get this one. Also mentions the OC extractor couple Paolo and Alanna, first mentioned in my big bang, [maybe you're gonna be the one who saves me](http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/79751.html) \- although this isn't necessarily in that universe.  
This story is written partly for [](http://www.livejournal.com/users/butterflythread/profile)[**butterflythread**](http://www.livejournal.com/users/butterflythread/).  
Eames is reading excerpts from the book _A Natural History of the Senses_ , by Diane Ackerman.  
Massive thanks to my betas, without whom this would not have existed: [](http://www.livejournal.com/users/laria_gwyn/profile)[**laria_gwyn**](http://www.livejournal.com/users/laria_gwyn/) and [](http://www.livejournal.com/users/photoclerk/profile)[**photoclerk**](http://www.livejournal.com/users/photoclerk/).  
disclaimer: I don't own the original stories, series, or characters. Not making any profit, just playing in the sandbox.  
summary: Arthur takes a job away from Eames. Eames manages to find a way to close the distance. Smexytimes ensue.

  
_Message from gravitywhatgravity: Arrived in Australia safely. V. hot and humid on the Gold Coast. This is more your kind of weather than mine._

Arthur mops his face absently with his handkerchief and continues to set up.

He’s alone today, as he often is when he’s starting to work on a new job.

It’s the heat, he thinks; it’s the humidity. The things that remind him of Eames. The hurried visits to Bangkok and to Cebu and to Mombasa; that last one just before they did the Fischer job. The Avner case that had ended with him and Eames taking an unexpected walk through the northern reaches of the Sahara Desert. Arthur prefers to be in more temperate climes, but this, this is somewhat comforting, even though he’s on his own this time.

Besides, it’s not as if Eames is in the best shape of his life. He’s just come off another job, something far more grueling, something from which he came home with several nasty bruises and three fractured ribs. Arthur has spent the last month or so looking after him, in the farmhouse in Minnesota. Eames is mostly knitted up now, but he has to spend another month resting, and he’s under strict orders to stay where he is.

Arthur thinks very briefly of the bottle of painkillers that Eames has steadfastly been ignoring all this time. He hopes it’s still sitting on their bedside table, just in case.

He rustles his papers as he looks for some background information. Underneath it all is the sound of the Pacific Ocean.

For this job, he’s working on Proclus Global’s dime. It’s a fairly aboveboard dreamshare familiarization and militarization course. Saito is opening up branch offices all over the world, and he’s sparing no expense in outfitting both the premises and his employees’ minds with the best money can buy.

The temporary office is located in the Surfers Paradise area, and Arthur is grateful that some of the windows can be opened because he likes to work to the rhythm of the sea. Soothing advance and retreat of the waves below. He’s deliberately oriented his desk so that he only has to glance up from his laptop to watch the surfers and the swimmers, the pristine expanse of beach twenty floors down, the blue waters shading into green and the distant horizon.

This is his first time working with the only remaining husband-and-wife team in the dreamshare business – but he already knows Paolo and Alanna fairly well. They had taken the time to smuggle Eames into the United States after the aforementioned last job: Alanna had bandaged Eames up, while Paolo had arranged for transportation from Lyon to St. Paul. Together they had warned Arthur about just how much of a beating Eames had taken.

And so: never mind the lack of a formal introduction, never mind the week that the two of them had tarried when they had family waiting anxiously to see them in the Philippines. The only thing that could have come out of that was the beginning of a friendship. So it doesn’t matter that he isn’t very familiar with how they work. Arthur thinks there shouldn’t be much trouble when it comes to this team.

They have six subjects to train, and so Arthur has been mapping out a rigorous ten-day course. Their subjects will need to know some fairly intensive anti-extraction techniques, and Arthur has taken a leaf out of Cobb’s book: he’s going to start off by showing them exactly how the Mr. Charles gambit works.

His laptop beeps.

 _Message from onemanarmyinthesnow: Glad to hear you’re in AUS. Don’t fall off the edge of the world._

 _Message from gravitywhatgravity: I won’t. How are you feeling?_

The next beep is subtly different, and Arthur opens the attachment with a raised eyebrow.

It’s a picture of Eames, who has somehow managed to take a picture of himself laid up in the large bed in the master bedroom. Weedy hair and the ever-present five o’-clock shadow. The dark lines of his tattoos, looping and swirling on paling skin. His familiar face, the dark rings around his gray eyes slowly fading. Lush mouth curved in a slight smile. Bandages visible under his thin undershirt.

Eames is surrounded by books and blankets and what looks like all of Arthur’s coffee mugs, scattershot across the two large bedside tables. The bottle of painkillers still looks pristine. Eames is wrapped in Arthur’s favorite comforter. Laptop and cables snaking off the edge of the bed; an iPod docked next to the left-hand lamp.

Details, details: Arthur notes the lines of pain in his face, already fading. The fact that he’s sprawled across the bedding, looser now, no longer holding himself rigidly because of his injuries. Pieces of paper stuck into several of the books – Eames reads everything and then doubles back to the passages he likes best. A masterful turn of phrase; a perfect explanation; a particularly funny pun.

Sometimes he reads Arthur his favorite parts.

Arthur thinks he misses that, very much: Eames propped up at the kitchen table, a copy of _A Study in Scarlet_ or _War and Peace_ or even Arthur’s graphic novel of _V for Vendetta_ in hand, reading passages in that richly rolling accent of his. The freighted drawl of the man in the Guy Fawkes mask as opposed to the imperious accents of Sherlock Holmes.

 _Message from gravitywhatgravity: Bored, then?_

 _Message from onemanarmyinthesnow: Not hardly. I’ve had an idea, and I’m working on it now, and I think you’ll like it. How long’s the job?_

 _Message from gravitywhatgravity: Ten days’ work, four days’ travel._

 _Message from onemanarmyinthesnow: Excellent._

And Eames closes out their exchange with another photo: his face in close-up, the grin that shows all of his teeth.

Arthur smiles and saves the picture and goes back to work.

///

“Thoughts on that Yan fellow?” Alanna asks briskly.

“He’s going to love taking the Mr. Charles ploy apart,” Arthur says, and pulls out another personnel file. “I can see why Proclus is hanging on to him; he’s very good at memorizing things. _Eideteker_.”

“Alanna, try it on him first,” Paolo says absently, his free hand scribbling rapidly across a sheet of paper.

“Forge?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

Arthur tunes them out for a moment; at this point his major function is to serve as the dreamer, and there is no one on the planet better suited to dodging rogue projections, so he’s taking it easy on the documents, leaves them to Paolo and Alanna’s analysis.

It’s day seven of the program. They have already had to field a note of thanks from Saito, a note that was nearly buried at the bottom of a large basket of chocolates and flowers.

Along with Saito’s package had come a much smaller one; they would have missed it – Arthur would have missed it – if it hadn’t been for Alanna’s sharp eyes.

This second package is addressed to Arthur, in a very familiar angular scrawl.

Arthur smiles, and thanks Alanna, and they go back to work.

He knows he’s smiling for the rest of the day, and he knows that Paolo and Alanna can see it, and right now he just doesn’t care.

There are bits and pieces of silver and color scattered around their tables, the foil wrappers mixed in among the usual jumble of papers and folders and laptop cables.

Arthur has always had a particular preference for dark chocolate; he’s been with Eames long enough to know that he shares that preference, too.

///

At the end of the day, Paolo and Alanna only need to look at him once, and they’re off to their hotel room. Yan has responded beautifully to the Mr. Charles gambit; it’s the success of their day.

Once he’s by himself in the office, Arthur quickly, neatly tears into the package to see what Eames has sent him.

Out falls a plain black thumb drive.

Arthur raises one eyebrow and plugs the drive into his laptop.

Eames’s voice rises gently, inexorably, into the air, insinuating itself into the ocean vista, the oranges and blues as the summer sun falls into the western horizon.

 _Try it now. Describe the smell of your lover, your child, your parent. Or even one of the aromatic clichés most people, were they blindfolded, could recognize by smell alone: a shoe store, a bakery, a church, a butcher shop, a library. But can you describe the smell of your favorite chair, of your attic or car? In_ The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests _, novelist Paul West writes that “blood smells like dust.”_

Arthur starts, and smiles, and blushes, and concentrates. It’s Diane Ackerman, _A Natural History of the Senses_. It’s the book he comes back to, again and again, when the dreamless nights become far too long. It’s what he reaches for when he doesn’t want to hook up to the PASIV. Lists of breathless description, of words and phrases that weave a magical spell.

He had left it on his side of the bed. He’d used it to relax while he was taking care of Eames’s injuries.

He pauses the track and closes his eyes, leans back into his chair, rocking it up onto its back legs.

He thinks of the cornsilk smell of the Minnesota farmhouse, grass and wild flowers and the lake-fragranced air. Wood and dog and squirrel and badger. Songbird’s feathers, stray flashes of red and blue in the summer.

He thinks of Eames. Musk and amber and the lingering faint smell of Kenya, smoke and salt; the cold metallic tang of his gun, the silversharp glint off the edge of his switchblade. Blood, so very near the surface in his mouth and his cheeks, the steady thump of his pulse, gray eyes and crooked teeth and fingers. Lines of ink, an entire history in code and black written into his very skin.

And Eames’s voice continues.

 _An ancient Chinese proverb says: “A bird does not sing because it has an answer – it sings because it has a song.” Few animal sounds are as beautiful as bird song. Once you’ve heard a whippoorwill throwing the boomerang of its voice across the summer marshes, you listen with a new sense of privilege._

This voice, Arthur thinks. Eames. He could hear it anywhere in the world, now, and while he’s already trained himself to ignore it if he absolutely has to, to harden the poker face he normally wears, he is completely incapable of hiding the surge in his blood, the pounding pulse of warmth and knowledge. They’ve been together for a while now, a year or so – and that’s long for them – and they’ve been wandering around the edges of commitment, skirting the shallow waters between “two” and “one”.

Oh, they’ve talked about it, over and over, in parenthetical reference: _We could be used as leverage against each other. What would induce you to betray me? How do I trust you with my name? With my life?_ Topics that an average couple would never have to breach or even think about. They’ve confronted each question, sometimes inside the dreams when they’re fighting for their lives; sometimes out in the real world, over coffee or coded email messages or in the moments after orgasm.

The answers, Arthur knows, are shading very steadily towards “the two of us”.

Night has fallen. Summer stars twinkling, southern skies above, calling to him from outside the windows. The endless hum of the waves.

Arthur locks the office behind him when he leaves, and he walks for a long time on the beach, Eames’s voice in his ears, salty wind blowing in his hair.

 _There is a point beyond which the senses cannot lead us. Ecstasy means being flung out of your usual self, but that is still to feel a commotion inside. Mysticism transcends the here and now for loftier truths unexplainable in the straitjacket of language; but such transcendence registers on the senses, too, as a rush of fire in the veins, a quivering in the chest, a quiet, fossillike surrender in the bones...._

///

When the job is done Arthur makes his excuses and leaves, hurriedly, an answering small smile to Paolo and Alanna’s knowing expressions.

Saito emails him his thanks en route, and casually drops in an invitation to Kyoto in April.

Cherry blossoms, Arthur thinks, and he’s already considering taking him up on it, with Eames in tow.

It’s a long, punishing flight back to the United States, and an even more jarring transition back into winter weather. But Arthur has his lover’s voice for company, and he listens to the recordings waking and sleeping; he lets Eames’s voice fill him up.

He promises himself that this is going to be the last job he takes by himself for a good long while. Eames has done him a tremendous favor with that thumb drive, with those recordings, but there’s nothing quite like living and working in the same spaces, knowing that it’s actually possible to reach out and immediately be able to find him, to touch him.

At the airport he changes into warmer, more casual clothes – sweaters, muffler, thick gloves for driving, three pairs of socks – and he hurries home, on the road at midnight, speed balanced with caution. The snow falls, but lightly, random small flurries churning across the windshield.

He comes home to the cracking sound of branches falling, the thump of snow crashing to the ground.

Warmth, darkness. He tiptoes through the house, steady clank of heat, picks up another afghan from the den, blows on his cold hands.

Eames is curled up on his side of the bed, several blankets pulled up around his ears. The Ackerman book still within reach. There is only one mug in the room, now.

Deep breath. The heat in the room is stifling and welcome. The bed smells like musk and coffee.

Arthur strips, hurriedly, hissing as the chill slides insidious into his skin. Yanks the afghan on around his shoulders, covering the skin and the scars. He all but dives into the bed.

Eames only has enough time to turn over and open his eyes before Arthur is bearing down on him, hot and hard and desperately needy, desperately missing him. He swallows Eames’s muffled gasp, the complaint against his cold feet, and _kisses_ him, hungrily.

“How do you feel,” he growls against the skin of Eames’s throat. Hands wandering, feeling along the other man’s body. Stark contrast between his voice and his mouth, and his hands.

“I’mfineshutupandkissme,” Eames says, all one word on a needy breath, and that’s it.

Arthur coaxes Eames onto his stomach, drapes himself all over the tattooed skin and muscles. He mouths a wet path down Eames’s spine, licks a spiral into the small of his back. Eames’s shouts wash over him. He stretches Eames open, slowly, with fingers and tongue, until they’re both shaking; and finally, with Eames keening mindlessly, he arranges them side by side, his chest pressed to Eames’s back and Arthur presses in, slow slipslide that knocks the breath from his lungs.

Eames keeps up a stream of needy encouragement. Arthur thrusts, slowly, hot metallic sting of blood in his mouth as he bites down on his lip – control, control, he doesn’t want this to end too soon. Eames bucks backward into each thrust. They’re almost buried in the heap of blankets and afghans. The world narrows down to the hot press of skin, to their hearts beating wildly, to Eames’s ragged gasping – “Please, fuck, moremoremore _Arthur_....”

And Arthur obliges him; takes Eames in hand and jacks him in time with his thrusts. He’s practically babbling into the back of Eames’s neck: “You really know how to make life so _difficult_ when we’re apart, fuck you – you made me remember _everything_. Your tattoos, your scars, what you smell like after a visit to Mombasa, paisley. _Your voice._ ”

“Since – _oh!_ ” Eames gasps as Arthur brushes, hard, against his prostate. “ _ **Fuck** okay right there_ – since when did you have a hair trigger?” And it shouldn’t be possible for Eames to actually still sound _smug_ , but he does.

“Since you sent me that thumb drive,” and Arthur shuts up, shuts his eyes. His blood roaring in his ears. He thrusts harder, more wildly, and finally Eames stills and shouts and he’s coming, hard, all over Arthur’s hand, and he sinks his teeth into Eames’s shoulder as he tumbles over the edge.

///

When they take the next job together, Arthur smirks and lets Eames see that he packed both the Ackerman book and the thumb drive in his carry-on.


End file.
